At the climax of “Death of a Salesman,” the hard-luck hawker Willy Loman hits the road one final, momentous time. In New Village Arts Theatre’s production, though, he’s gone almost before the story starts.

Whether it’s through directorial design or a matter of actorly style (possibly a combination of both), Jack Missett’s Willy comes off as a kind of emotional vacuum, a briefcase-toting black hole around which swirls his family’s rage and desperation.

In one way, Willy’s virtual absence from his own story adds an extra measure of heartbreak to Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterwork: Here’s a man who constantly touts the importance of being liked, yet finds that people are constantly talking past him.

But it also makes arguable dramatic sense for a couple of reasons. While the play’s title foreshadows Willy’s fate, it’s often forgotten that the phrase actually comes from a story he tells about a legendary fellow salesman who died on the job – with his boots on, so to speak. (Actually, green velvet slippers.) It’s an ode to glory – and it honors someone else.

And in her program notes, director Kristianne Kurner (NVA’s executive artistic director) tells of how a 1983 production of “Salesman” in China convinced the late playwright that the piece was as much about the Loman family as about the faltering Willy. Kurner’s stark, fitfully stirring production bears that out in its close attention to the other Lomans’ struggles.

Of course, all this might be ascribing too much to Missett’s performance, which is so contained and little-varying in its rhythms that it can come off as monotonous at times. But his austere style does serve to set off some moving, agonized work by his cast mates, two of them in particular.

Dana Case conveys an exquisite sense of pent-up pain as Willy’s wife, Linda, particularly in the famous “attention must be paid” speech to the couple’s two grown-up, wayward sons, Happy and Biff. Linda is the soul of the play, and Case lights her up with a steely fire.

And as Biff – the unwitting focus of all his father’s hopes and frustrations – John DeCarlo brings a creeping tension to the role, all but carrying the play through its tragic climactic scenes.

Greg Wittman also does well by the more cool-headed, smooth-talking Happy; Eric Poppick gets at the essence of the prickly but caring neighbor Charley; and Frances Regal has a couple of suitably tart turns as The Woman. (There’s also solid work here by Kyle Lucy, Jeff Anthony Miller, Sassan Saffari, Virginia Gregg and Kelly Iversen.)